Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.
Author's Notes: At the end of this ficlet I make references to two short stories, The Company of Wolves and The Tiger's Bride, both were written by Angela Carter and can be found in a collection called The Bloody Chamber and online. Also, this is unbeta'd so please be kind if you review.
There was no decrease in entropy. The universe did not contract, time did not reverse itself; and yet, Mischa had been returned to him. After two years of cohabitation Clarice Starling had given him a daughter and, in her, his beloved sister has been returned to him; in her, he sees what his sister could have been had she lived passed the winter of 1944.
After Mischa's (re)birth Dr. Lecter began to lavish her mother with gifts, unable to deny her anything since she has given him what he had once lost. He gives her jewelry and dresses and any other trinket she lays her eyes on. Other children would look at their fathers showering their mothers with such fine things and think them to be acts of love and affection. Not Mischa. She sees these tokens, not as acts of love, but as acts of devotion and worship. She knows that her father sees Clarice as having played the role of Christ in the resurrection of his dead sister and, fourteen years later, he is still a supplicant. Mischa knows that it is not love that binds her parents – it is her, it is understanding and observance. They are simply following their own natures.
Sometimes Mischa reads old tabloid stories about her parents; she finds their romanticism and dramatizations amusing. Most of the authors are men and, at times, compare Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter to Beauty and the Beast or Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. Some say that he has killed her and has simply vanished back into the dark. The sentimental ones hypothesize that, since he has seemingly stopped killing, she must have saved him somehow.
"These are just stories men tell to make themselves feel safe," Clarice explains. "Women tell truer stories in whispers and undertones."
And one day, when her parents are dead and buried and her existence has been revealed to the world, a reporter will ask Mischa for the truth.
"Was your mother ever afraid of him? Did he force her to go with him?"
"No, my mother knew she was nobody's meat," she will sigh and grin. "She was the tiger's bride."